‘Observe Him for the Love of Mockery’: Revelry, Satire, and Performance in the Late Elizabethan Middle Temple
摘要
Through an examination of revelry, this chapter demonstrates the importance to Twelfth Night of one of its earliest playing spaces, Middle Temple hall. Watson discusses how the revels of 1597/1598, Le Prince D’Amour, performed in the same hall, illustrate the undercurrent of violence and transgression in Middle Temple and connect them to Shakespeare’s play. She explores how the play’s depiction of homosociality reflects the lives of those young men watching at the inn and examines the combative verbal play in the depiction of masculinity in both the revels and Twelfth Night. Arguing that presenting oneself as a gentleman is a product of verbal dexterity, behaviour, and appearance, the chapter goes on to consider how constructed masculinity is conveyed in the revels and the play, and argues a close link between the nature of the inn at the end of Elizabeth’s reign and transgression in Twelfth Night.